"Lost" producer/co-creator talks about bringing the series to a close

The Smoke Monster's days are numbered. Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and friends are finally within reach of some sort of closure. The true reality of the Oceanic 815 gang — who have flashed back, forward and sideways since they crashed on the mysterious island — will presumably be revealed.

As for Damon Lindelof, the Teaneck native who co-created "Lost" is feeling different emotions from day to day.

"I think really, really tired is the way that I'm feeling right now," he said on a late February afternoon. "We are in the midst of writing the series finale right now, so there's a lot of sort of, 'Well, here we are. I can't believe it.' There's sort of a sense of, Is this really happening?

"And then, of course, there's a certain degree of sadness and depression that this marvelous relationship is ending. And then there's the tremendous excitement of saying, 'Wow, we've spent six years kind of planning this thing. It's all coming to a conclusion and we can't wait for people to see it.' "

"Lost" — arguably the most analyzed and dissected show in television history — will end its six-season run on May 23.

Losties have had lots of time to accept this reality. Back in May 2007, in an unusual move, ABC announced that the show would end in 2010, because its producers — chiefly, Lindelof and Carlton Cuse — wanted to set an end date in order to better plot the resolution of their complicated series.

"The idea of being told you have to get from one place to another in a car, but nobody tells you how much gas is in your tank, inhibits your ability to know how fast to drive to go where you're going," says 36-year-old Lindelof. "Once you know how much fuel you have, everything changes."

On the phone from Los Angeles, he chatted about his beloved "Lost," explaining, for example, how much the writers knew about the show's ending from the start.

"When we first wrote the pilot … we didn't even know if they'd want a second episode, let alone 100 more," Lindelof says. "It was really between the first and the second season, where Carlton and I and the other writers figured out the underlying mythology of the show. But of course, we didn't know how to deploy it until we had the end date."

Clues, 'Easter eggs'

"Lost" quickly became known for the esoteric clues and "Easter eggs" its producers layered in — some "just wink winks" and others "integral to the story plot," he says.

"I remember when I was a kid — my dad was a huge Beatles fan, as am I — looking at the album cover for 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' and seeing all the things that were in there," says Lindelof, who thought "if you could do the same kind of thing for a television show — where people had to kind of pause it and say, 'What do you think this meant?' — that would be really cool."

The writers also used time shifts to expand the narrative. "The part of the storytelling we love the most is the idea that you can actually leave the island every week without really leaving the island," Lindelof says. "So, we did these flashbacks for three seasons. We did flash forwards for season four. Last year, the island itself was flashing and half the people were still off it — that's how we were able to leave the island. But we knew when we were resolving season five, this idea that the characters had to try to change things would result in this new narrative device, which is …"

He pauses.

"Everybody's kind of trying to figure out what it is," he says of the sideways. "Are they 'what if' stories? Is it an alternate reality? And all we've said is, 'This is the big mystery of the season. You think that you know what these things are, but we're not going to tell you. You have to keep watching, and over the course of the season, hopefully it will become more and more apparent.' "

Recently, tv.com featured a piece about the five types of "Lost" fans: "the super hardcore" (the analysts); skaters/jaters (obsessed with whether Kate will end up with Sawyer or Jack); the catching-up-on-DVD set; angry Losties; and the "eternally confused and faithful."

Told about this, Lindelof chuckles. "I'm sure that you could come up with even more categories than that, but I'm hard-pressed to think of somebody who doesn't fit into one of those," he says.

In fact, Lindelof affectionately classes his mother, Susan Klausner of Hackensack, as an "eternally confused and faithful" fan.

"I'm not sure my mom would be watching 'Lost' if it weren't for the fact that I happen to be writing it," he says. "And the weirder the show gets, in terms of engaging in time travel and non-linear storytelling, and all that, I'm not sure it's her cup of tea. She's a very bright woman, but she likes her mystery novels. … You know, 'It was so and so with the candlestick in the drawing room.' Once you start introducing elements of time travel into those stories, it's a whole new ballgame."

Lindelof has no idea how all the different types of "Lost" fans will react to the finale.

"I think we resign ourselves to the fact that the worst thing that we could do would be to try to play it safe and make everybody happy, as opposed to doing the ending that we think is best for the show," he says. "We're trying to do something that is really satisfying for us … because so far, usually when it's satisfying for us, it's been satisfying for the audience. … We'll see. The skaters and the jaters might hate it, but the eternally confused might finally find a light at the end of the tunnel."